It looks like several companies are learning what happens when you mess with the internet - and they're learning it the hard way. Several major companies have been hit by the collective powers of Anonymous after 4chan launched several distributed denial-of-service attacks. What many have been predicting for a long time now has finally happened: an actual war between the powers that be on one side, and the internet on the other. Update: PayPal has admitted their WikiLeaks snub came after pressure from the US government, and Datacell, which takes care of payments to Wikileaks, is threatening to sue MasterCard over Wikileaks' account suspension. Update II: Visa.com is down due to the attack. Update III: PayPal has caved under the pressure, and will release the funds in the WikiLeaks account.

I have always been surprised 4chan has never been attacked or vilified by politicians or mainsteam press. They even invent silly metaphorical entities like Anonymous to avoid breaching the subject of 4chan.

Either everyone is trying to mentally block 4chan by refusing to acknowledge their existance, or they are really afraid of them.

I have always been surprised 4chan has never been attacked or vilified by politicians or mainsteam press. They even invent silly metaphorical entities like Anonymous to avoid breaching the subject of 4chan.

4chan is a large community, when people refer to 4chan they're generally referring to /b/, which many of the other sites in 4chan hold in disdain.

Anonymous is a subset of /b/ users, which are an even smaller subset of 4chan users.

Vilifying 4chan for the actions of a subset of users is ironically symbolic of what Anonymous is fighting against, the censorship of the internet based on the actions of a few.

Besides, if /b/ is going to be vilified, Anonymous is relatively low on the list of reasons. There are much more disturbing things to deal with first.